Mod Note:
While it is a time honored practise on the Straight Dope to make jests at spelling mistakes, lets avoid the jokes pushing into the offensive territory please.
Also lets not start telling religious or ethnics jokes like it was still 1970.
Please remember a mod note is not a warning and they are not tracked. Just a mild instruction.
My apologies.
So far as I know, parents still on occasion allow houseguests to chat with their children alone.
Regarding old movies in general, the more obvious shift in what’s permitted is all the smoking everywhere. That movie doesn’t have it (I don’t think), but a lot do.
Do non-athletes shower in schools anymore? When I was going to high school in the mid-90s we never showered after PE. The weird thing is kids shows of the time depicted MIDDLE SCHOOLERS taking showers in school which was unfathomable to me at the time. Never even understood the point of taking a shower after playing dodgeball either like they showed on TV.
I wasn’t exactly a child–I was about 20 years old–but my undergrad university had a rifle range. I was an enthusiastic shooter, and belonged to the school’s rifle team. I kept my competition rifle at the range, but I learned to shoot on my Dad’s simple .22 plinker. I wanted to see how it would work at our range. With the range officer’s permission, I was allowed to bring it along one night (we typically practiced in the evenings).
I couldn’t find a place to park near our range building, but I eventually found a place to park. Not near the building that housed our range, but maybe a ten minute walk away. No big deal; I parked, got my rifle (in its homemade canvas case) from the car trunk, and headed over to the building that housed our range. As always, my ammo was in my jacket pocket.
Yep, I walked across a college campus, with my rifle and ammo, in a canvas case that practically screamed, “There is a gun in this case,” and nobody minded.
Last time I watched “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” this number Be Prepared to Pay | Christmas Specials Wiki | Fandom was not sung (I think the melody was played at one point):
“If you sit on my lap today
A kiss a toy is the price you’ll pay”
We started having forced post-PE showers in 5th grade. I was a bit apprehensive about that at the time (early 1970s) but after about a week, it was no big deal.
I was in junior high school 1982-1985, and we never took showers after PE. In high school, I only had to take PE the first two years; each year there was a swimming unit that lasted a few weeks. They made us shower after getting out of the pool. Otherwise, we never showered after PE.
I was in high school in those years and forced showers were still the norm. To the point of PE teachers very occasionally spot-checking for wet hair when you left the locker room. It was avoidable much of the time (and many did) because typically the teachers had better things to do at the end of class than monitor everyone every single day. It was really only strictly enforced when we were swimming. But it was a constant nag.
what does that have to do with the OP?
The OP asked for things that could be done in my childhood that you couldn’t do today. Wives could be raped by their husbands without consequence for the husband, blacks could be treated differently by the state, and gays could be openly shamed. Nothing in the OP said I had to put a white male, Mayberry filter on the answer.
The usual situation was that I would be late to my next class if I decided to shower.
In your childhood.
Did you, in your childhood rape any wives? Did you shame gays? Did you treat blacks differently?
We showered after PE beginning in 7th grade, which would have been 1975, and continued all the way through high school.
I was never a fan of being naked among my classmates. Supervision was usually lax, and as you can imagine the bullies had a field day.
Do kids not shower at school anymore?
During my childhood plenty of peoplE did those things. Also littering, people would just throw their garbage out the car window and people smoked everywhere, everything reeked of smoke.
The very first episode, Gordon, a teacher, has walked a new student home from school, holding her hand, because she is scared to walk home on her own. They walk to his apartment, ostensibly because he lives nearby, and are going on to her apartment, but they stop for him to drop off his briefcase, and he introduces his wife, Susan, who as it happens, has just baked chocolate chip cookies. So they invite the student in for cookies and milk before taking her to her apartment.
In 1970, Sesame Street.
In 2020, L&O: SVU.
My father, a usually decent soul, would sink his beer cans in the lake while fishing. He justified it by saying they were steel and would rust away in a year or less. He stopped doing it when they switched to aluminum.
Mostly not, it appears. It definitely seems to have died out by the 1990’s at the latest - here’s an LA Times article from 1996 talking about it. We’ve had multiple threads on this with younger posters a little aghast at the tribulations endured by their elders.
I started staying home alone when I was seven.
To be fair, that one really bit my Mom on the ass. One morning I missed the school bus and decided to ride my bike to school, in the winter, via our local freeway. I ended up lost, freezing and climbing into a car with a strange man who promised to take me to school (he did.)
I was kept on a much shorter leash after that.
Littering was incredibly common. People would dump their car ashtrays out their car windows at stop lights.